The Araceae are a family of herbaceous monocots with 125 genera and about 3750 species including the Lemnaceae.

The vast majority of the genera occur in the New World tropics. Members of the family are highly diverse in life forms, leaf morphology, and inflorescence characteristics. Life forms range from submerged or free-floating aquatics to terrestrial (sometimes tuberous), and to epiphytic or hemiepiphytic plants or climbers. Leaves range from simple and entire to compound and highly divided, and may be basal or produced from an aerial stem. The family is best characterized by its distinctive inflorescence, a spadix with bisexual or unisexual (sometimes with sterile region) and subtended by a solitary spathe on a long or very short peduncle.

The IAS maintains a list of horticulturaly important recent changes to the generic classification of species, which may be found here.

Peter Boyce and Tom Croat have been maintaining a list of the currently valid genera, their species numbers and distribution. We are pleased to be the official repository of that list in PDF form: "The Überlist of Araceae, Totals for Published and Estimated Number of Species in Aroid Genera", most recently updated !!FEB2018.

The list may be cited as:

Boyce, P. C. & Croat, T. B. (2011 onwards).The Überlist of Araceae, Totals for Published and Estimated Number of Species in Aroid Genera. http://www.aroid.org/genera/180211uberlist.pdf